188 SCIENTIST 



life. It is our feelings rather than our thoughts that make 

 life important to us and even determine whether we Hve 

 or die. 



Because the subject is so important, perhaps I ought to 

 take a little time to explain what I mean by art as a means 

 of sharing the subjective world. What the artist is trying 

 to do is to devise ways of making other people feel the way 

 he does about certain matters that are important to him. 

 Much art enriches our lives by enabling us to see or hear 

 more than we otherwise would and to share with the artist 

 his joy in seeing the first flowers of spring or his admiration 

 for deeds of heroism. More complex reactions with more 

 practical objectives may also be produced. Many of Dick- 

 ens' novels were only a very slightly camouflaged attempt 

 to make the British upper class feel what it was Hke to be 

 a little boy growing up in England during the Industrial 

 Revolution. The very greatest artists, people like Shake- 

 speare, Dostoevski, Michelangelo, and Bach, are primarily 

 concerned with getting other people to share their feelings 

 about what is currently referred to as the "human condi- 

 tion" — the tragic discrepancy between man's aspirations 

 and his capacities, the conflict between individual liberty 

 and the sense of divine order, the ambiguities which arise 

 as sons love their mothers and become jealous of their 

 fathers, the "last infirmity" which overcomes noble minds 

 as a normal striving for excellence turns into "vaulting 

 ambition." Since we are all doomed to suffer from these 

 conflicts and ambiguities, it is the artist's business to share 

 with the rest of us his view that irony and tragedy have at 

 least a certain grandeur and may be part of a great design. 



Not only are science and art both interested in enlarg- 

 ing the area of shared experience. At the higher creative 

 levels, their techniques for doing so are closer than one 

 might suspect. People who are not scientists often feel 



